Allright, quick question, i think.
Currently i am running Unreal Engine on a 10 year old XPS Studio 8100.
As you can imagine, it is HELL.
So… i saved up, but now i realize that i do not know what is important to run Unreal Engine as smoothly as can be.
Is the processor the most important part? Or the videocard? Or perhaps memory?
So i turn to you… the experts.
What would be, in your opninion the creme of the creme, top of the crop Unreal Engine Development configuration?
It depends on your budget
Processor is very important during development, but you can get away with something a bit less during gameplay.
Thank you for your reply. The buget here is about 7500 euro’s for the complete system.
With all that money you can go either Intel Xeon or AMD Threadripper , 64GB RAM or even 128GB RAM and Hardware RAID-6 Controller with either HDU or SSD. And a good UPS system too.
I can tell you the exact hardware I would buy if you wish, I prefer Intel and Nvidia anyway.
And video wise? How “high end” does that need to be?
That’s much more than you’d need to spend, so consider how much you’d want to spend.
A good GPU is the Nvidia RTX 2080 ti
For CPU the AMD Ryzen 9 3900x which just came out is very highly rated, though you can also wait for the Ryzen 9 3950x which will be coming soon
Since you can afford it, get at least 32GB of RAM
You can easily get a 4K 32" monitor with your budget, they have become quite cheap nowadays too, like these:
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07KKNP8VK?..aQLTwByXF4a7Ig
How necessary is the 32gb of ram? Do people run out of ram with only 16gb? Would 16gb be enough for moderate sized single-level scenes? Not open world, just a normal FPS shooter level size. What part is ram-heavy? Just running the editor with a lot of assets? Compiling code? Lightmapping?
The open world demo requires 24GB of RAM to load, and that doesn’t have baked lighting
So it’s going to be mostly for the project content and light baking, the final game won’t need as much RAM. If you have a lot of high resolution textures and other big assets it’s going to take a lot, and if you have many objects in your map then it’ll need it for light baking.
Well with the experience going back to UE4.0
Top of my wish list would be storage. Very important if making a desk top game as the amount of usable assets piles up fast with just the free stuff available.There is also iteration and backups.
Ram memory would be next starting at 32 gigs as although compiling times is massive during the development cycle you will be making use of different applications at the same time. There are 3ds editors, sound editors, you might want to make use of an animation editor, and of course watch Netflic at the same time.
Video card selection I feel is more important than CPU selection as most things in UE4 are hardware rendered.
CPU the more power the better but not as critical as GPU selection.
A second monitor.
A comfortable chair. 
To help make your own selection.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
Interesting info as it tells you by percentage what you future customers are using and set a minimum system requirement.
With your budget you could get a system like this, a Dual Xeon with Hardware RAID-6 controller and SSD caching:
ASUS WS C621E Sage (90SW0020-M0EAY0)
https://geizhals.at/asus-ws-c621e-sa…8.html?hloc=at
2 x Intel Xeon W-3223, 8x 3.50GHz, tray (CD8069504248402)
https://geizhals.at/intel-xeon-w-322…5.html?hloc=at
Adaptec SmartRAID 3154-16i, PCIe 3.0 x8 (2295000-R)
https://geizhals.at/adaptec-smartrai…9.html?hloc=at
6 x Western Digital WD Red 8TB, 3.5", SATA 6Gb/s (WD80EFAX)
https://geizhals.at/western-digital-…9.html?hloc=at
2 x SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB, SATA (SDSSDA-1T00-G26)
https://geizhals.at/sandisk-ssd-plus…5.html?hloc=at
12 x Samsung RDIMM 8GB, DDR4-2400, CL17-17-17, reg ECC (M393A1K43BB0-CRC)
https://geizhals.at/samsung-rdimm-8g…8.html?hloc=at
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming OC 11G, 11GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DP, USB-C (GV-N208TGAMING OC-11GC)
https://geizhals.at/gigabyte-geforce…4.html?hloc=at
Supermicro 747TQ-R1620B schwarz, 1620W redundant
https://geizhals.at/supermicro-747tq…8.html?hloc=at
With this system you would have 96GB RAM in Hexa-Channel mode which means a lot of bandwidth, 16 cores, redundant PSU and a massive 30TB usable space RAID-6 dual parity protection with at least around 1GB/s sustained speed and very low latency thanks to the SSD caching on the two 1TB SSD drives that the hardware RAID controller does by itself.
Add a good 4K monitor and a good UPS (like this one: APC Smart-UPS 2200VA LCD SmartConnect ab € 1148,90 (2021) | Preisvergleich Geizhals Österreich) to complete a reliable configuration like this and it should last for many years before being obsolete, you could just upgrade the GPU every 2-3 years if needed and that’s it.
Actually, most of the things that take any significant amount of time use the CPU. Lightmass, compiling(code and shaders), importing, packaging, ect.